Amie Lin

Amie Lin (b. 1978, Taipei) is a Taiwanese-American visual artist who has been living and working in Berlin since early 2014. Prior to Germany, she has lived in Taipei, Los Angeles, London, Florence, Shanghai. Amsterdam and New York. Lin studied Psychology and Graphic Design at University of Los Angeles in California (UCLA) where she received her Bachelor’s degrees in 2001. She later obtained her Master’s degree in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in New York in 2005.

For the last decade, Lin worked as a Senior Art Director in the fashion industry. Despite a fruitful career in commercial arts, Lin never deviated from her artistic practice. Having grown up bestride between eastern and western cultures, she has cultivated a point of view that encompass both worlds but beholds biases from neither one. She kept a home-studio in Brooklyn and applied the knowledge and skills that she has acquired from the commercial world into her personal projects. She now pursuits art full-time in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S., Asia and Europe.

Amie Lin Artist Statement

Prior to pursuing art, I studied Psychology for several years at UCLA. During of which I encountered Carl Jung’s work on the Shadow. According to Jung, every person carries a “shadow aspect” — an unconscious layer of one’s personality which lurks below the surface of their conscious mind. This side of a person is linked to a more primitive animal instinct, which is superseded during early childhood. Jung believed that interactions with the shadow in dreams may shed light on one’s state of mind.

Motivated by my fascination with the Shadow, my work is an exploration into the darker aspect of my own unconscious. My palette is typically very limited, with black as the predominant color. I prefer materials that have a primitive quality such as wood, raw wool and silk. Sometimes I layer them to represent the various levels of the unconscious. I also enjoy the juxtaposition of the hard against the soft, for instance, pairing silk against rusty metal.

For the Lamb Girl series, I adopted the metaphor of the black sheep to express my own fear of being an outcast. Having grown up in an immigrant family and introverted by nature, I’ve experienced my share of alienation and feelings of not belonging. The girls in my portrait are part woman and part sheep, the sheep parts represent the submersed animal instincts. Although the portraits of my subjects fill up the canvas and can be considered very “present”, they are at the same time “veiled” from the audience. Each of them lurk in the elusive space between dream

and reality.